Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday March 15, 2014 @03:51PM
from the walking-back-innovation dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Last year Valve announced a new game controller that was trying to innovate on the designs that have been with us for over a decade now. The biggest changes were replacing analog sticks with circular touchpads and plopping a small touchscreen into the middle of the controller. Valve has now revamped their prototype hardware, and the touchscreen is nowhere to be seen. In its place are stop/play buttons (which appear similar to start/select buttons) and a bigger Steam logo button. They've also moved around the directional and ABXY buttons, reverting to a more traditional layout (picture). They'll be demonstrating the latest prototype next week at GDC."

They said their reasoning was that a screen on the controller forced you to split your attention between the TV screen and the controller screen. The screen on the controller would only end up being useful when you weren't playing a game, and the cost wasn't worth it for being used strictly for non-gaming.

Plus, Valve is now using "Ghost Mode".They now show what you are touching on top of the game while you are touching it.Details are in the Steam Controller talk during the Steam Dev Days; starting 23:35 [youtube.com].